Photos by Thomas Park & Alexander Grey
How present is your body when you are trying to figure things out?
During a recent group call with participants in Grounded Connection, my 16-week coaching program, I asked each person to check in with a question to the group.
I emphasized the shift between egocentric and allocentric modes of perception.
The egocentric mode looks inwards and tends to foreground personal narrative.
The allocentric mode looks outwards, facilitating interpersonal connection.
To do this, I suggested a 3-part process:
Get quiet & slow down. Ask yourself: how am I doing? See what comes.
Come up with a question that articulates something you’d like to understand better in order to feel supported in cultivating more well-being.
Rephrase your question as a general question such that it could be a useful starting point for an inquiry that would benefit everyone in the group.
As you can see, this process begins in an egocentric mode, then shifts into an allocentric mode. While both modes are vital to us, most modern people (especially in the West) are biased towards the egocentric mode - with pathological consequences.
We mistake my world for the world. (oops)
This exercise is an opportunity to practice a crucial attentional shift that I encourage all of my clients to get familiar with. It’s nothing less than an essential survival tool for the 21st Century as society becomes increasingly organized by algorithms.
A small group of humans designs the algorithms based on their view of the world. (oops)
You too can experiment with this three-part process to find useful questions for your community. When you move from step 2 to step 3, listen for a shift in your body.
Below are the questions my clients came up with.
Below that, I share a teaching excerpt, a guided attunement with the Presence Mantra.
(I have often written about the Presence Mantra elsewhere on this Substack, for example, here)
Notice how each question lands in your body:
- If you have become dissociated - how do you ‘snap out of it’ and return to presence?
- How might your current energy and sense of presence relate to the food you ate today?
- How do you stand up for myself when external circumstances are pressuring you to forfeit your autonomy - for example, how you choose to use my time?
- How can you get better at giving yourself credit for ‘mindful moments’ you manage to include in a busy day, and spend less energy telling yourself that you are ‘not mindful enough’?
- How do you maintain well-being while interacting with institutional systems that are broken?
- How do you build an authentic and grounded sense of connection with loved ones who are geographically distant and with whom you mostly connect virtually?
- How do you break down a large task into more bite-size pieces so that you can move past ‘staring at the blank page’ and into action?
- How can you maintain the highest standards for your well-being while managing pain?
- How are you doing RIGHT NOW? Answer by tuning into the quality of your breathing.
Go deeper by listening to the audio:
Your body has answers for you.
Some specific correspondences related to these questions that could be useful:
To snap out of non-presence, back into presence:
All five relationships are roads to presence and you can work with any of them that feels most available in the momentFeeling what you ate:
Pay attention to the space in your body, particularly in your mouth, down your throat and into your belly. Does it feel contracted anywhere? Is there room to gently expand?Standing up for yourself:
Tune into BONES and GROUND. Your voice is most powerful when you can feel the ground in your belly and throat. Draw strength from below the ground. Expand.Giving yourself credit
Notice if you contract inwards when inner speech is loud. Tune into external sound.
Look out into the world with soft eyes. Everything mirrors you. Feel your belonging.Dealing with broken systems:
The human being in front of you is dealing with this too. Slowing down facilitates understanding. Widening and deepening spatial focus makes it easier to ‘hold space.’
Creating meaningful virtual connection:
Soaking up in-person connection is wise. Complaining about its absence on Zoom is not. Feel your own body from head to toe. Be touched by the musicality of voice and gesture.
Getting past the ‘blank page:
Breath, ground, space, sound and light each offer a fresh vantage point. Visit the less familiar relationships without needing answers. Feel something you’ve never felt before.Living with pain
Taste breath’s nourishment. Feel the trustworthiness of ground. Allow space to be free. Hear how each sound could make music. Modulate light to your liking. You deserve life.
The 16-week Grounded Connection program was designed to help creative people overcome the inner obstacles that keep them from making the true contribution the world is calling them to make. Your peers in the program will mirror this back to you.
By rediscovering comfort in your body, clarity of mind, more skillful emotional regular, more satisfying interpersonal connection and an enriched field of perception you can learn to fall in love with life again.
From here, the sky’s the limit.
To inquire about the enrollment process, book a free 45-minute call.